Neighbors of a mansion on Chicago’s north side yesterday OK’d Haymarket Books’ plan to move in by a 50-30 vote; but only after the publisher’s application for a zoning variance was attacked by pro-Israel forces who conflated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.
At Shavuot celebration at Tzedek in Chicago, Marc Ellis says Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust thinker who believed that Israel was the path to bring Jews out of suffering and towards redemption. Unfortunately there was no room for Palestinian suffering in that worldview. So relates Liz Rose, who used to write adoring letters to Wiesel, and planted a tree in Israel in his name.
“No one in our family was ever as passionate about Israel as me, and now I’m the most critical.” Liz Rose meditates on her summer in 1986, at the Alexander Muss High School, when she fell in love with Jerusalem.
Liz Rose reflects on the 2017 JVP membership meeting in Chicago: “Stefanie Fox, Deputy Director at JVP, also critiqued the power structures that drive Israeli politics in her opening remarks at Saturday’s plenary. Fox talked about her own process of getting ‘past the layers of denial,’ and moving to the place where she could ‘acknowledge what had been stolen.’ Quoting from Adrienne Rich’s poem, ‘Diving into the Wreck,’ Fox read, ‘I came to explore the wreck,’ and she beautifully connected Rich’s poem to her own ‘understanding the wreck of Zionism.'”
“It’s like sleeping with a corpse,” Ilan Pappe said of the two-state solution, at the Israel Lobby and American Policy Conference this past Friday. “We should all attend the funeral and we can put this past us already.” Pappe’s remarks–which reflected the theme threaded throughout the day of looking directly into the dark times we are in–were in response to John Kerry’s 2014 statement that Israel must adopt the two-state solution or risk becoming an apartheid state. “It’s already dead,” Pappe said at his keynote address, given at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Liz Rose writes, “For this former Zionist turned anti-Zionist, the day was a refreshing batch of unapologetic anti-Israel lobby and anti-occupation speakers.”
The day after Donald Trump won the presidential election, I received an email from one of my undocumented students in my Junior English class. “I’m scared. I don’t have anything to return to in my home country, and the U.S. has become my home.” Liz Rose meditates on the shifting meaning of home during a crisis of leadership.
West Jerusalem’s apartheid: Look no further than Gap, North Face, American Eagle, Clarks, Timberland, the fancy shops in the Mamilla mall that erases the difference between the Old City and the city west of the green line.
Instead of attending a traditional Shabbat service last Friday night, members of Tzedek Chicago, the city’s new non-Zionist congregation, joined the massive protest again presidential candidate Donald Trump. Rabbi Brant Rosen wrote: “Clearly this is not the most conventional way to greet Shabbat. Nevertheless I do believe–and trust you will agree–that this is where we need to be tonight.”
At a Zionist summer camp in Michigan in the 1980s, author Liz Rose and other young Jews felt comfortable exploring their sexuality together and looked forward to taking that experience to Israel. It took her years to understand that her community was eroticizing the land of Israel and leaving out the Palestinian story.
On a crisp, sunny fall day, Tzedek Chicago, the new non-Zionist congregation held its first Yom Kippur service in a Lutheran church